The Washington Post is reporting that back in 1965, while Romney was a high school senior at the prestigious all boys Cranbrook School,  the GOP Presidential canidate was a bully that teased and victimized another student because he thought he was “gay”

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

Lauber talked about how traumatic the experience has been to him and how its followed him all these years: “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.” Just another piece of evidence that, far from being a rite of passage, bullying has lifelong negative consequences.”

From a school-yard bully to a professional Republican bully. Does this really surprise anyone?

* The incident was recalled and verified  by five former students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named